I mentioned Google Sightseeing once before but never imagined how useful it could be in finding hazardous roads. 😉 This “dangerous bridge” is just about 30 miles north of where I live. It is actually the Clark Bridge, spanning the Mississippi River at Alton, Illinois.
Fun Ideas for the Weekend
With the Memorial Day weekend looming large, I humbly offer these ideas to keep you busy. First, Boing Boing refers us to a web site with instructions on how to create your own Popsicles out of Guiness. The original site seems to have exceeded its bandwidth allocation so you’ll have to make do with this […]
Small Business Committee Meeting
Minutes from the Small Business Committee of the St. Peters Chamber of Commerce, May 26, 2005. St. Charles Community College, Executive Dining Room. Presentation by Floyd Bell, Data Access Solutions & Y2Marketing. Introductions including name, company, and unique selling proposition (USP). The USP should be 10 words or less. Million Dollar Marketing Equation: Interrupt + […]
Duct tape festival in Ohio
Without Boing Boing, I would never have found out about the Duct tape festival in Ohio, to be held on Father’s Day weekend (when else?). With a bit more tape, I think I can get the car to hold together well enough to get me there! 🙂
Got Encryption Software? Better Get a Lawyer!
News.com reports that Minnesota court takes dim view of encryption, presuming that the presence of encryption software on a computer may be viewed as evidence of criminal intent. “We find that… the existence of an encryption program on his computer was at least somewhat relevant to the state’s case against him,” Judge R.A. Randall wrote […]
Hats off to Al “Screw-Up” Lewis
The Denver Post reports this story about Al Lewis, a man who does much to restore my faith in mankind. “I just believe things should be done the way they should be done,” he said. After a cargo strap on his truck broke, spewing about 5,000 spikes on the highway at 60 MPH, Al actually […]
Big Brother is Watching in Chicago
From Slashdot we learn that Big Brother, and everybody else, is watching if you commit a crime in Chicago. Check out ChicagoCrime.org to see where the bad guys are operating in the Windy City. Possibly more practical is this Cheap Gas hack. Hats off to Google Maps, which is providing the underlying mapping data for […]
Stock Photography, Images, Animations, Graphics
Looking for images for your web site? Be they photographs, animations, or graphics, here are a couple of good places to look. iStockphoto has a wide variety of stock photography with some graphics. Prices are incredibly cheap, just $1 for low resolution stuff that is suitable for web sites. Animation Factory has a huge variety […]
On-line Photo Galleries
I have two favorite on-line photo galleries, depending on whether you want to host the photos on your own server or let someone else handle the heavy lifting. For free stuff on your own web server / web site, nothing beats Gallery. This works great until you start to fill up the disk on your […]
Fond Memories of Amdahl
Deadprogrammer’s Cafe has a wonderful posting titled Amdahl : Business in the Front, Party in the Back which includes photos of a board out of an old Amdahl 470 mainframe. That was the first “large” computer that I ever used, at the University of Michigan in 1976. Ahhh… those were the days. 😉 Those of […]
Bug Fixed: One Reason Why Open Source is Cool
Ever wonder about why people like me continually rave about the wonders of open source software? One reason is because bugs get fixed really fast. Witness some of the security flaws in Firefox which were reported recently and patched within a few days. Here is a more personal example. I had been having a problem […]
HOWTO Open a Kensington Laptop Lock with a Toilet Paper Tube
Were you thinking of using a Kensington lock to secure your laptop computer? You might want to reconsider. Thanks to Boing Boing for this pointer to a demonstration of how to open a Kensington laptop lock with the cardboard tube from a roll of toilet paper. Here is the two minute long, 7.5 MB WMV […]
Ease of Self-Publishing
Blogging continues to fascinate me on both the technological and the social levels. I noticed an article in Wired News this morning titled Bands Embrace Social Networking. Apparently lots of musicians, from indies through established bands, are using MySpace’s music section to self-publish, bypassing the radio stations and MTV. Add to this the rise of […]
Renewable Energy Done Right
From Wired News comes this thought provoking story titled Brazil Schools U.S. on Renewables. I love the concluding paragraph of the story: Consumer acceptance of ethanol in Brazil has grown for financial reasons, according to Felipe Atoline, a Sao Paulo forestry engineer who now drives an ethanol-only car. Many Brazilians were unhappy when the government […]
Flying Snakes — How They Do It
Found in Wired News: Furthermore Switching to Glide 02:00 AM May. 14, 2005 PT Forget about snakes in the grass — beware of sailing serpents. While it’s not exactly news that some snakes take to the air, a University of Chicago researcher finally figured out exactly how the limbless reptiles pull off their amazingly effective […]
Undersea Restaurant
Krassy found this undersea restaurant and I owe him a huge debt for that. The Maldives | 15 April marks the day that the first ever all-glass undersea restaurant in the world opens its doors for business at the Hilton Maldives Resort & Spa. Ithaa* will sit five meters below the waves of the Indian […]
Decoding Bees’ Wild Waggle Dances
Scientists have decoded the dances that bees use to tell each other where to find food… …with radar… …after attaching transponders to individual bees! From the article: After finding food, scout bees returning to the hive dance on the vertical walls of the honeycomb. A round dance indicates the food is very close, within 35 […]
Google Delivers
Google impresses the heck out of me. Obviously, it provides an awesome array of features, stuff that you can get from it. Underlying all of that stuff, however, is an incredible chunk of software that “understands” what you want. Google “knows” a lot about what is out there. When you type a query, Google matches […]
Hillarious Firefox Promo Videos
Ever wonder why so many of us think that Firefox is great? Watch these videos. There’s nothing more that I can say…. 🙂
Pay Microsoft Twice
Microsoft today announced the beta test of Microsoft OneCare. In case you haven’t heard of OneCare, this is Microsoft’s anti-virus “solution.” Doesn’t it seem odd that MS builds insecure software and then wants to sell us a second product to secure it? Isn’t this like buying a brand-new-but-broken safe from the store and then paying […]
